[CD REVIEWS]

CD REVIEWS

"My last album dropped/And you may think I flopped," raps Yo Gotti. And you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. He doesn't deny that his strong 2006 album, Back 2 da Basics, found fewer buyers than he might have liked. But he's not asking for sympathy, instead he has returned with a brash new mixtape, Cocaine Muzik, compiled by DJ Smallz, which gives listeners another chance to appreciate two of his greatest assets: his slurpy voice and his stubbornness.

As the title suggests, Yo Gotti still specializes in rhymes about the risks and rewards of the drug trade. He's a Memphis rapper with an unusually musical voice, a warm drawl - enriched by a rasp and a slight lisp - that turns just about every phrase into a singsong melody.

In Aww Man, a collaboration with Juelz Santana, Yo Gotti is almost whispering as he delivers the chorus: "Hood faaame/Got my swag' so hot - yeah, I'm the maaan." Yo Gotti doesn't just rap his verse, he moans it. In the tone and texture of his voice, it's not hard to hear evidence of hip-hop's debt to the blues.

"I go by the name of the R 'n' B hippie, neo-soul rock star Raheem DeVaughn." That's how DeVaughn announces himself at the beginning of his second album, Love Behind the Melody.

Those opening words are happily misleading. DeVaughn isn't really a hippie or a rock star; he's a slow-jam specialist with a mellow voice and a restrained approach. He doesn't (or perhaps can't) fill his songs full of ostentatious ad-libs, so he sticks to the tunes, even when he's ascending into falsetto to underscore a point. Like many R 'n' B singers, he positions himself as a soulful alternative to the competition.

And he sounds pretty convincing; lovingly paying tribute to "that old four-letter word," or using a placid hip-hop beat for Woman, in which he explains how he feels about the same. (In a word: good.) But he sounds even better when the plot thickens in She's Not You. It seems "you" might be learning a bit too much about "she": "Even if I took her seven digits, trying to be slick, she's not you/If I crossed the line, laid with her one time, she won't do."

If this album isn't quite the R 'n' B triumph it wants to be, you can blame some meandering tracks produced by Kenny Dope, from the pioneering dance music duo Masters at Work. And Customer, which beats a fast-food metaphor into the ground.

Through a half-dozen studio albums since 1998 the Drive-By Truckers have revealed a mission: Come up with a song for every kind of person in the modern American South. There are 19 more on their new album, Brighter Than Creation's Dark, including family men, criminals, drunks, workers, addicts, soldiers, even musicians. The music is a wide-ranging idea of Southern rock that draws on not only the amalgams made by bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers, but also on their sources and roots. Over the past decade songs from the Drive-By Truckers have juxtaposed observation and fiction, autobiography and allegory, but not a lot of ego.

Instead of aiming for a particular trademark sound, the Drive-By Truckers have always let the song dictate the style. They can be noisy and turbulent, as in That Man I Shot, or steadfast and long-suffering, as in The Home Front.

This is a typically crowded Drive-By Truckers album, but the overload is part of the point.